>dang: I'm sorry it feels arbitrary. I think we're looking at this from different perspectives and continuing to argue about it will likely only be repetitive.
One thing's for sure: if antitrust action against Facebook or other big tech cos does go ahead, it will get thoroughly and repeatedly discussed on HN. So our positions will converge in the long run.
I just don't think "candidate says X" is substantive enough to meet the bar—keep in mind that front page space is the scarcest resource on HN, so every important story gets insufficient attention, and whatever story you care most about, it's always going to feel like it's starved for coverage. (I'm sure even Rust hackers feel the same way.) I appreciate your passion on the topic and the fact that you care enough about HN to take time to make a case about it.
Daniel
>rollingdeep: The only way this has been repetitive is that I have repeated my simple request for you to directly address the specific concerns instead of a general dismissal on your part. If you cared to directly engage the content, this would not be repetitive. Alas, I don’t believe you care about such news even if it is legitimately significant which you have failed demonstrate otherwise. Per my reasonable requests, you haven’t even attempted to directly engage the content and substance, but you have generally dismissed it.
I’m afraid because you have no interest in the significance of this kind of news, that the spread of such information is hampered. Do you realize that you are effectively influencing the spread of information, and this news is highly relevant to that and you? Just as Facebook has the power to influence the spread of information, so does HN. I see no reason to hamper/suppress this discussion as you are allowing, except perhaps the suppression of this information/discussion is preferable to you and Y Combinator.
On some level there is no guarantee of actual regulatory action without public education and public support of those issues and regulatory actions. Your decisions seem to support obstructing the spread of that information and letting the facts bubble to the surface of public consciousness.
Thus I completely disagree with your decisions on a factual basis.
Because Zuckerberg already testified that election influence and interference was not a serious threat, it is newsworthy that he turns around here and says the opposite, that companies would not be able to control interference threats in the face of a breakup.
Also newsworthy is the existential nature of the legal battle he openly talks about, whether or not there is legitimate reason to be broken up as regulations do have a purpose. Especially since in the same audio he admits there are election influence threats to worry about, it seems to pit facebook directly opposed to the democratic system and regulations meant to uphold democracies. Saying we will use our deep pockets which are deeper than the U.S. regulators—to fight any regulatory action (which seems reasonable now) is like saying we will fight against democracy and being fairly regulated because we have more money and power than the people and government do in any legal battle. The rules, it seems, will not apply to FB or any company of similar size and power.
Dang, that is not a stringent test any of kind. It is highly arbitrary. It is a list of your previous decisions on whether a post is new information—most of which are simply declarations of your decision and provide no stringent rules to test.
It also doesn’t explain why the previous topic was locked and deleted. This new information had just been broken and not posted here before with the specific story coverage on Zuckerberg’s election interference comments. All that had been posted before was the raw audio leak/transcripts but not real journalism coverage of the significance like techcrunch. Theverge literally had one sentence of journalistic coverage on this: “In language that is often more candid than he typically uses in his public comments, Zuckerberg seeks to rally the company against Facebook’s competitors, critics, and the US government.”
And because it’s in every readers interest to be informed why certain actions are taken, I have no option but to show the community the rest of the conversation here which I don’t see you giving any attention to in your post (which is concerning).
>rollingdeep: Article is opinionated as many on HN but represents an important current news story to discuss. By all means the source can be substituted for a less opinionated one if an alternative source of similar coverage exists (I did not find any at the time). I have not found a negative comment that does not misquote the article, nor is anyone able to reply with correct info or bring more substance in response such as the disturbing history of antitrust lawsuits funded by Microsoft that surpass even the funding by the government.
>dang: This seems to me to be political back-and-forth of the moment and therefore off topic by the site guidelines. Sorry; I understand that interpretations of these things can differ.
Daniel (moderator)
>rollingdeep: So you are saying you would not have allowed the coverage of the Microsoft antitrust suits at the time on HN (if HN existed in the 1990’s and early 2000’s)? If find that difficult to believe.
>dang: I'm not saying that. What antitrust suit is happening right now? I was under the impression that there isn't one yet; just political sniping between advocates for either side of one which may or may not happen.
Daniel
>rollingdeep: Google and Facebook are currently being investigated by by 50 attorney generals (of 50 U.S. states) in an antitrust probe. That is more than political sniping. These new comments by Zuckerberg are a direct result of this regulatory action that is already in motion, which would obviously come under even closer scrutiny under a Warren presidency (she is the current leading candidate in the U.S. polls). The story here is:
1: Zuckerberg openly talks about funding a major legal battle that would very likely outsize any normal regulatory budgets (that are more or less fixed in size) to enforce U.S. antitrust regulations—similar to how Microsoft was able to escape regulatory interventions by funding a legal war of attrition against the U.S. government, even though the anticompetitive behavior was well known and evident.
2: Zuckerberg talks about not being able to control election influences in the face of a breakup. This is rather odd considering that he testified that nefarious election influence via facebook was not a serious threat. It implies there is power to influence elections and there are implications suggesting FB may use this power for their own purposes or as a bargaining chip in regulatory actions.
Again, this is more than political sniping.
>dang: When said antitrust probe generates significant new information, that will be on topic on HN and get lots of discussion. Articles about what candidates say during election campaigns, not so much. If we're to treat all those as on topic, there won't be room for anything else.
Warren said some stuff; Zuckerberg said some stuff; Warren said some more stuff. Politicians and CEOs say lots of things. I don't think that meets the bar for significant new information, and I'm pretty sure the bulk of the HN community would agree, which explains why the submission got flagged.
Daniel
>rollingdeep: Again, I find that very difficult to believe Daniel. If you feel so strongly that your are correct, please explain this time how this news not significant new information. You can’t just declare that and not present evidence of your declaration. I just summed up what was significant in what was said by Zuckerberg beyond any “back and forth” and you completely ignored that and hand waved it away without directly addressing any of the significance of that content.
You also appear to be appealing to whatever users would like to flag this news beyond it not being newsworthy. Just because there are users that dislike any negative news about FB whether it is newsworthy or not, does not prove a topic was appropriately flagged for being too political. I’m afraid your logic does not add up.
Please do a solid and present a comment from the discussion that you believe accurately articulates how this news is not at all significant, how there is not enough HN appropriate content (again, Microsoft would have been no different), and does not misquote or hand wave away the opposing points presented.
I’m confident you can’t present any such comment because they don’t exist—because they fail to meet a stringent set of stipulations and actual scrutiny. To be honest I feel your decisions here are not meeting any stringent standards of enforcing HN policy. This enforcement feels rather arbitrary.
The outcome was a settlement as a slap on the wrist for a company that size and that arrogant (did you watch Gates’ testimony?). Really no significant business practices were forced to change either.
When you are FB or Google or Amazon or you know... Microsoft... there are issues with how the government could ever effectively regulate such an industry with outsized funds (much larger than the fixed regulatory budgets) and power (influencing people and elections). The legal process was never designed to work effectively or efficiently at such a level. The legal process becomes such a war of attrition that you can weather any investigation as Microsoft did.
Agreed that the formalism tends to be an appeal to authority or simply a way to appeal to a bias and shut down opposing views. I think more often than not, formal fallacies are misused and misapplied in informal debates, relying on over-generalizations and highly inferred arguments that can’t be supported by the literal facts of the debate and misread or outright mischaracterize the actual arguments. Often the person accusing another of a fallacy is in fact false and committing their own fallacy.
Maybe this could be useful resource to disprove and shut down attacks that misuse formal fallacies.
You’ve identified what everyone else can’t understand. Kudos.
This is especially damaging to drivers that desire to drive their own vehicles and choose how much they want to drive. The proposed wages are way below what you should be taking home in an area like SF, and you are depreciating your own expensive asset and paying your own fuel and maintenance, auto insurance, health insurance and so on.
The real gem however is this would force drivers to use the rental car program which doesn’t make much sense unless you are driving all week long. It is a way for Uber to control drivers making them unable to reject poor work and working conditions without actually making those drivers employees. As an independent contractor you should be able to turn off your Uber driver app when the pay starts sucking, and go work for someone else at your own discretion. There’s no freedom to do that rolling around in an Uber rental.
>The outsourcing companies argued that the law would apply to them only if the American workers who were displaced by visa holders they hired had originally been their employees, not Disney’s. Judge Presnell was persuaded by that argument, although he did not entirely reject the idea that the Americans were “adversely affected” by being fired.
>>The decision was a broad victory for Disney and its contractors, but Judge Presnell left the former workers a small window to amend their lawsuits and to try again.
The lower court’s decision was based on a literal technicality loophole in the regulation where two companies are involved instead of one. An appeal was left open where a higher court may choose to use more leeway in interpreting the spirit and intent of the law and whether that technicality is skirting the law.
Please don’t post misinformation and straw man arguments instead of the OP’s intent.
Not sure how you jump to “lump of labour fallacy” here when the article was discussing wage suppression. This trope is beyond tired and misused. Please stop spreading misinformation.
Please don’t post misinformation. Exponential growth (population or otherwise) is a tired economic trope. The frontier days are over, please update your views to modern times like the past 70 years or so where growth is much more limited than the frontier days and is fairly linear—probably due to the fact that the economy (especially the USA) is a mature system and you can’t so easily apply unnuanced econ101 generalizations (from the previous century) about the lump of labour fallacy to today’s system.
You incorrectly imply that tech jobs will expand organically in a frontier-like or exponential fashion as happened in the past. That doesn’t actually happen in the tech sector. Tech companies seek to exclude alternative hire options from other STEM fields (engineering, science, etc.) because those alternatives would not be as cost efficient. Instead the tech jobs grow linearly (like most mature industries and systems) and only by the annual cap on visas being granted.
How you can tell that there is no absolute shortage of tech labor is that the number tech jobs never grows beyond the visa cap. If there were a shortage, companies would find more creative ways to exceed the cap limits like the above mentioned alternatives or creating training factories to increase the supply to meet organic needs/demand.
So while this mature system is not necessarily a fixed lump of labour, the mature constraints that apply seem to limit any organic growth to the current regime we find ourselves in. That is to say that companies constrain the tech labour system to their very skewed preferences instead of organic growth, and as a result the economic pie is growing less and less, and there is more and more competition over slice distribution. Incumbents are absolutely in direct competition with foreign labour and there is less overall growth to share equitably. Again, not a fixed lump of labour, but increasingly competitive to the point of very limited growth from within.
>dang: I'm sorry it feels arbitrary. I think we're looking at this from different perspectives and continuing to argue about it will likely only be repetitive.
One thing's for sure: if antitrust action against Facebook or other big tech cos does go ahead, it will get thoroughly and repeatedly discussed on HN. So our positions will converge in the long run.
I just don't think "candidate says X" is substantive enough to meet the bar—keep in mind that front page space is the scarcest resource on HN, so every important story gets insufficient attention, and whatever story you care most about, it's always going to feel like it's starved for coverage. (I'm sure even Rust hackers feel the same way.) I appreciate your passion on the topic and the fact that you care enough about HN to take time to make a case about it.
Daniel
>rollingdeep: The only way this has been repetitive is that I have repeated my simple request for you to directly address the specific concerns instead of a general dismissal on your part. If you cared to directly engage the content, this would not be repetitive. Alas, I don’t believe you care about such news even if it is legitimately significant which you have failed demonstrate otherwise. Per my reasonable requests, you haven’t even attempted to directly engage the content and substance, but you have generally dismissed it.
I’m afraid because you have no interest in the significance of this kind of news, that the spread of such information is hampered. Do you realize that you are effectively influencing the spread of information, and this news is highly relevant to that and you? Just as Facebook has the power to influence the spread of information, so does HN. I see no reason to hamper/suppress this discussion as you are allowing, except perhaps the suppression of this information/discussion is preferable to you and Y Combinator.
On some level there is no guarantee of actual regulatory action without public education and public support of those issues and regulatory actions. Your decisions seem to support obstructing the spread of that information and letting the facts bubble to the surface of public consciousness.
Thus I completely disagree with your decisions on a factual basis.